Morning Links: Metaphysical Salami Edition

“The art world has greeted the hiring of the new director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York with a mixture of intrigue and disappointment.” So writes Nadja Sayej, who suggests that the institution’s choice of a white male head “has been seen as regressive by some.” [The Guardian]

MoMA director Glenn Lowry wrote a tribute to David Rockefeller, “the last of an extraordinary generation of collectors.” Among the sentiments expressed: “What struck me most about David, whom I was fortunate enough to meet in the mid-1990s when I became director of MoMA, is that for all the pleasure he took in the hunt for beautiful works of art, he took even more pleasure in sharing his acquisitions with others.” [CNN Style]

Sales

“Private sales through auction houses are suddenly big,” the New York Times says in an article that notes Sotheby’s private sales grew 28 percent last year. [The New York Times]

Civilizations, premiering tonight with the first episode of a nine-part TV series co-produced by PBS and the BBC, “is the most ambitious story about art ever told on television.” [The Washington Post]

David Hockney fans, rejoice! The Paris Review published part of Lawrence Weschler’s catalogue essay about the artist’s “explosively energetic exploration of reverse perspective” now showing at Pace Gallery in New York. [The Paris Review]

Benjamin Sutton sizes up Solange Knowles’s new performance-video-sculpture artwork at the Hammer Museum in L.A., which “may be Solange’s most ambitious art project to date.” [Hyperallergic]

Guardian critic Jonathan Jones went to a Joseph Beuys show in London and didn’t buy it. “The exhibition made me fear I am giving Beuys the benefit of the doubt in seeing tragic depth in works that are glib symbols of redemption,” he wrote. But then, also: “perhaps my desire to see history in his art is just an attempt to rationalise the power it exerts on me.” [The Guardian]

Misc.

A show of Steve DiBenedetto paintings in New York elicited an essay in the New York Review of Books that addresses the “kind of earnest, wide-awake, and self-aware humanism, very much of a pre-Seventies postmodern variety” that connects the artist to “his peers Huma Bhabha, Matthew Barney, and Carroll Dunham.” (Bonus tidbit: He has a work titled Metaphysical Salami!) [The New York Review of Books]

Eleanor Davis, a cartoonist for the New Yorker, has a new book, Why Art?, that includes parts in which she “turns the tropes learned in art school into a series of humorous cartoons.” [The New Yorker]